Archive By Section - Viewpoint

If you routinely read the food-service inspection reports in The Times, you may have wondered why health inspectors are so picky about things such as the temperature of foods and how often employees wash their hands.

But when a Fulton County woman died last month after eating bacteria-contaminated oysters at a restaurant in Hapeville, it was a reminder that proper food handling can mean the difference between life and death.

GAINESVILLE - Financial analysts say the economy is still chugging along at a healthy pace. But charitable organizations that work with the needy are telling a different story.

"We've been inundated since about August," said Mike Walston, who runs Good Samaritan Food Ministries for the Chattahoochee Baptist Association in Gainesville. "The number of people we're helping has about doubled. We're really getting kind of worried, because it seems like there's no end to it at this point."

Tuesday marks six years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But for most Americans, the threat of terrorism seems to have become little more than background noise. Just last week, a major terrorist plot was reportedly foiled in Germany, but the average person in the United States probably didn't even hear about it.

Man versus mussels. That's the way the fight over sharing Lake Lanier's water has been characterized. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it has to release a certain amount of water from Buford Dam in order to support endangered species at the southern end of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin.